Mac Screenshot Destination Changed

A co-worker showed me that (on the Mac) you can move the destination of screenshots (e.g. ⇧+⌘+4) from the desktop to another location. I am going to touch on a number of things all at once in pursuit of doing this very thing:

make some assumptions

create a new screenshots directory in a hosted storage solution

link to that directory using a symlink (symbolic link [ln -s])

change the default OS behavior to push the files out to that hosted storage directory

follow up with housekeeping and related information

1. We will first assume that you are using a hosted storage solution like Google Drive. Some other options might include OwnCloud, or Dropbox. (Some may read into the absence of a link to Dropbox as some sort of slight. I would like to avoid that ambiguity: that is a slight. I trust them like I trust their deep-state-deferential parent Microsoft to keep my data safe from prying eyes. But you didn’t come here for a lecture, just a tutorial.)

2. Let’s create a new directory in Google Drive for your images (~/Google\ Drive/Pictures/screenshots). In terminal, enter the following:

cd ~/Google\ Drive
mkdir Pictures
cd Pictures
mkdir screenshots

3. At this point, let’s create a symlink (symbolic link) to screenshots:

ln -s ~/Google\ Drive/Pictures/screenshots ~/Pictures/screenshots

4. Now, let’s change the behavior of Mac OS X to write those screenshots to that new location in your hosted storage (or wherever else you determined to do it):